ALEXANDER KEYSSAR THE RIGHT TO VOTE PDF

Alexander Keyssar. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, xxiv + pp. $ (paper). The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. Front Cover. Alexander Keyssar. Basic Books, Jun 30, – History – pages . Keyssar, Alexander. The right to vote: the contested history of democracy in the United States /. Alexander Keyssar p. cm. Includes index. ISBN X.

How Democratic Is the American Constitution? For better treatment of that, read Give us the Ballot, which is much mor This is a hard book to get through, but it’s worthwhile.

Charles rated it liked it Jul 08, Not only Catholics and Jews, but also Native Americans, free blacks, and nonnaturalized aliens could vote in some places and not in others. Those who opposed any expansion of suffrage also relied heavily on the belief that in order to vote a person had to be independent. Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment.

The Right to Vote: Although the Civil War temporarily enfranchised blacks in the South, allowed for the first absentee voting by soldiers rigyt, and also led some states to pass “declarant alien” laws allowing even some noncitizens to vote, it was followed by increasing residency requirements for alexandfr areas including preventing students from voting in their college townsand increasing property requirements for voting in some local or municipal elections, and of course a violent repression and increasing level of poll taxes, literacy requirements and residency requirements in the South.

Did the colonial franchise restrictions, then, have to be abolished?

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Mar 15, Patrick Sprunger rated it it was amazing Shelves: Vpte I plan on reading Give Us the Ballot: The original voting population was more keysar than most casual readers of US history probably think. The issue of suffrage was always near the center of that debate: The second was that property owners alone possessed sufficient independence to warrant their having a voice in governance. The first was that men who possessed property especially “real property,” i.

Mar 06, Mehrsa rated it really liked it.

There was an error while adding the following items. Like Cattle and Horses. Only men with property, preferably real property, were deemed to be sufficiently attached to the community and sufficiently affected by its laws to have earned the privilege of voting.

Explicit and Authentic Acts. The Articles of Confederation were to be scrapped; the increased–but restrained–powers of the federal government had been specified; the issues of state representation and slavery had been compromised; and a great many details outlining the operation of a new republican government had been etched in parchment. Smashing the DC Monopoly. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.

Apr 10, Michelle Mayfield rated it really liked it Shelves: Dissent and the Supreme Court. This was an amazing book to learn about the history of voting rights in our country.

Alexander Keyssar demonstrates how the conservative band of the first American political spectrum opposed challenging the colonial status quo of limiting to vote to property rich, adult, white males.

Implicit in these arguments was the claim that voting was not a right but a privilege, one that the state could legitimately grant or curtail in its own interest. The Fallacies of States’ Rights.

May 10, Kirsten rated it really liked it. A Very Short Introduction. Even Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most democratic leader of the revolution, accepted Blackstone’s equation of property with independence and the right to vote–although Jefferson sought to solve that distasteful equation by advocating the distribution of free land to the propertyless.

The western world’s most durable and perhaps most celebrated written blueprint for representative government was soon to become the fundamental law of North America’s new nation.

The overall impression a reader will take from The Right to Vote is that every freedom we feel is inviolable today was once hard fought for. Landowners would maximize their political power if the franchise were tied to freehold ownership, while city dwellers, shopkeepers, and artisans had a direct interest in replacing freehold requirements with taxpaying or personal property qualifications. Blumstein the court said that there was no “compelling state interest” in residency requirements longer than about 30 days which was later added to the Voting Rights Act of The War in Rhode Island p.

Supreme Court For Dummies. Jul 20, Matthew Rohn rated it it was amazing. You akexander remove the unavailable item s now or we’ll automatically remove it at Checkout. Various historical dynamics, such as economic development, immigration and class relations, underlie this periodization, expressed, Keyssar says, in shifting ideologies: This is a hard book to get through, but it’s worthwhile.

Jason rated it it was amazing Nov 20, States also added lengthened “residency” requirements, demanding people live 1 to 2 years in a state before voting. Summary Most Americans take for granted their right to vote, whether they choose to exercise it or not.

In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, only members of the Alexandsr church alexandfr vote; in the eighteenth century, Catholics were disfranchised in five states and Jews in four.

The right to vote : the contested history of democracy in the United States

The Ultimate Federalist Papers Collection. Whether these laws altered rather than codified existing practices is unclear; but the statutes seem to have been more restrictive by the middle of the eighteenth century than they had been in the seventeenth. These differences had two sources.